Hi,
On 05/24/2017 01:20 PM, Yaron Koren wrote:
* Did you
receive approval from the Wikimedia Foundation's legal
department to use the MediaWiki trademark?
No, and I haven't asked. For what it's worth, I've been involved with other
projects that used the word "MediaWiki" (like the book "Working with
MediaWiki", and the Enterprise MediaWiki Conference), and I didn't ask
permission for those either. I'm guessing that it won't be an issue, but if
it is, I'll be happy to talk to the relevant people about it.
I think writing a book about open source software and soliciting
donations online are different from a trademark perspective but IANAL.
Someone else already let WMF legal know, so I'm sure they'll reach out
to you if there are any issues.
* What is the
roadmap of the organization? What is the planned
governance model?
As I said before, it would be great to have nonprofit status in one way or
another, and it would be great to have a board of directors and so on. At
the moment, the key goal is bringing in more member organizations. As for
decision-making, the idea is that members' votes are tied to the amount of
money they put in - so more or less, every member organization decides how
it wants its own contribution to be spent. Though of course there will be
coordination and discussion. I don't know if that answers your questions.
I'm mostly trying to understand what is the expected outcome of this.
* Will you/the org be contributing to MediaWiki core? Or will all
development take place in extensions?
* What kind of work do you expect to be taking on? Will the
planning/resource allocation process be public so interested developers
can help out (I'm thinking like Wikimedia's Community Wishlist)
* Will all the code be OSI licensed, preferably GPL v2+? Or will it be
private and owned by the member organizations that asked for it?
* Will the organization maintain the code it writes? Or will it just be
one-off projects of writing code and publishing it?
To be clear, I'm very excited that you are interested in working on this
(and have wanted someone to pick this up for a while now), but I'm
concerned about what seems like a lack of structure/transparency/etc.
for an organization that I would like to promote and ask companies to
donate to.
-- Legoktm